Indenes are important compounds and are useful chemicals to make pharmaceutical medicaments or other important industrial chemicals such as plastics and resins. In addition, indenes have been used in research and development to make pharmaceutical medicaments. For example, indenes and their pharmaceutical preparations can be used as medicaments for the treatment of obesity, liver and cancer. PCT/KR2005/001051 discloses a process to make indenes that can be used to modulate the peroxisome proliferator activator receptor (PPAR) to treat many diseases. However, the process has many steps and uses toxic chemicals that can have high research and development costs and high manufacturing costs. These methods use very acidic and toxic chemicals that can pose a hazard for personnel working with the chemicals which are extremely dangerous. It is desirable to provide a process that does not use corrosive chemicals and that is useful for making substituted indenes that can be used as medicaments or high value chemicals for use by different industries.